Open­ing Dana Rubin‘s new book, Jew­ish Voic­es, culls the wis­dom of over sev­en­ty-five con­trib­u­tors, as well as beau­ti­ful art­work by renowned artists either born or based in Israel. On one side of each two-page spread is a quo­ta­tion, and on the oth­er side, a short biog­ra­phy of its author.

This is a book about hope. Its pub­li­ca­tion could not be more time­ly, arriv­ing in our hands mere weeks before the first anniver­sary of Octo­ber 7th. Through­out Jews’ long his­to­ry, we have been dis­placed and dis­rupt­ed, and yet again and again, we per­se­vere. Jew­ish Voic­es goes a long way to demon­strat­ing how we have done so.

Through­out the book’s ten sec­tions, Rubin takes us on a jour­ney through Jew­ish life. These range from the ​“land of milk and hon­ey” to hol­i­days, tra­di­tions, and tikkun olam. She has assem­bled a wide range of con­tem­po­rary voic­es, includ­ing Jer­ry Sein­feld, Ben Stiller, Judy Blume, Rachel Gold­berg-Polin, Noa Tish­by, and Rab­bi Angela Buch­dahl. Rubin inter­spers­es these quo­ta­tions with those from ancient texts, allow­ing us to more ful­ly appre­ci­ate the sig­nif­i­cance of Jew­ish thought across time and space. ​“This sec­tion,” Rubin writes at one point dur­ing the book, “ … [sum­mons] the Jew­ish resolve to cre­ate light in the face of evil.” That is, after all, what Jews have been doing for thou­sands of years and will con­tin­ue to do. 

Jew­ish Voic­es is a book for this moment. It will speak to Jews and non-Jews alike because it is, above all, about our human­ism, our humanity.